A conversation with artist Zina Swanson
Zina Swanson (She/Her) is a New Zealand artist based in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Swanson’s paintings, sculptures and installations draw on plant-related lore, and while they’re often humorous and uncanny they also hint at a darker view of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
What is your favourite ice cream flavour/topping?
I’m not a huge sweet tooth but currently my favourite flavour is probably the sweetest ice cream on the market… Banoffee
What would the title of your autobiography be?
I think it would be more of a “How to” guide. “How to stress out when there is nothing to stress out about”
What is your favourite plant?
There are too many to name… but I have a particular fondness for White Japanese Anemones but when the petals drop off and the little green seed heads remain… then when they dry they go white sort of like a dandelion head, and then puff open, spreading their seeds.
What inspires you?
The view to the garden from my studio windows. The garden was planted by the property owner some 40 years ago. We have around 5 huge Tī Kōuka which attract the Kererū, who have nearly flown into me numerous times as I stand on the deck and they come bumbling through going from tree to tree.
One of your works is called “All my sticks have aura’s”, how would you describe your aura?
A multicoloured muddle
Self Portrait as Tree 2021
Your artwork often explores the relationship between humans and the environment - could you elaborate on this?
I guess my work has always focused on some sort of plant/human relationship… what that is specifically always varies. The series of paintings I did prior to All my sticks have aura’s was focused on plant lore found in a book called Animal and Plant Lore (1899), a collection of oral English language histories. Several of the phrases informed the subject matter of the works, “Tiger Lily with Nose Border (Smelling tiger lilies causes freckles)”, “Imagined Wood with Leaf Flames (Burn wood and the flames will form themselves into the shapes of the leaves of the trees from which the wood came)” and “Stunt (Pointing at a Daffodil will keep it from blooming).
I’m interested in the way we force our own histories onto plants seemingly as a way to understand them. I also often use actual plant material in the works. I made a piece called “Plants from the sale table” which was a replica of a plant nursery display stand full of dead and dying plants that I had bought from the reduced to clear table at The Warehouse. I was always drawn to these plants and the layering of price stickers on top of one another.. getting cheaper and cheaper. . as the plants get sicker and sicker. I bought them all and presented them in the gallery on this stand. There was a sort of sadness about the plants that I wanted to show and I guess that was exacerbated by the fact that they were completely neglected (intentionally) in the gallery space and eventually died.
When I was buying the plants someone was following me and my trolley of dying plants around the garden department and looking at me as if they wanted to know what I knew… was I getting some secret deal they didn’t know about or was I capable of bringing these plants back from the brink… I guess it was quite the opposite.
Your artwork also is also very humorous - what is your reason for incorporating humour into your work
It’s weird.. people often say that but I don’t really feel that way about most of the works!
When not creating art you can find me...?
Either at my library job, the gym, Paludal (an artist-run space I co-founded with artist James Oram and writer Simon Palenski or in the kitchen cooking.
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